The vocalization of postvocalic lateral in French
Abstract
Vocalization of the lateral in syllabic coda provided French with forms that have rounded posterior vowels, such as /o, u/ (cf. salvus > fr. saufs /o/ ‘salvo’; pulmonem > poumon /u/ ‘pulmão’), and rounded front ones, such as /ø, y/ (cf. filtrum > feutre /ø/ ‘feltro’; pul(i)cem > puce /y/ ‘pulga’). The latter did not exist in the Latin vowel system; thus, they were unknown, unlike the former. In the diachronic context, this study focuses on the evolution of Latin forms bearing ‘l pinguis’, which resulted in French words with rounded vowels, either [- post] /ø/ or [+ post] /o/. This paper argues that one of the sources of rounded front vowels in French is the Latin sequence of vowel + lateral liquid in the medial position of the word. The explanation is provided with the support of Autosegmental Phonology, by the features that comprise the internal structure of the segments of the sequence. The corpus under study was collected in historical grammars, etymological dictionaries and historical compendia of French phonetics and phonology.
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